The Role
Picture this: it’s Monday morning at your typical industrial design job. Your boss hands you a brief for a [PRODUCT] that needs to look like whatever the current Amazon top seller is. You have until Thursday to finalize DFM. Nobody will ever know you designed it, which happens to be the one part of the job you’re grateful for.
Now picture the alternative: you open your inbox on Monday to an email from [PHONE MANUFACTURER]. They sent over the .stp files for three phones that won’t be announced for another six months. You hop on a call with the brand strategy team to brainstorm the next product that’ll get 12 million views on the [UPCOMING DEVICE] review from MKBHD.
By lunch, you’re in a Figjam with four other industrial designers, sketching concepts together in real-time. One idea survives and you let it breathe overnight. The next day, you’re in Onshape, working out whether a kickstand can nest inside a 1.4mm wall without the hinge becoming the first thing that breaks.
A week of refinement and another week of DFM later, manufacturing has CAD they can start cutting steel from. Six weeks after that, you’re holding the first sample and finding everything wrong with it.
Later that year, the population of a city is holding the finished product. Nobody will ever know you designed it, either. The difference is that you’ll want them to.
We’re looking for a Junior Industrial Designer: someone who can take a device nobody’s ever seen and build something for it, from the empty .stp to production-ready CAD, then stay with that product through samples, tooling, and the hundred small corrections between the T0 and the golden sample.
That individual is probably a year or two out of an ID program, drawing things they’ll never be able to make. Maybe they’re first-year at a consultancy or working for a brand whose products nobody cares about. Perhaps they’re still in school and have a portfolio that’s better than their grades would suggest. Where they currently sit matters less to us than whether they can see a 0.1mm problem in a CAD and refuse to let it reach mass production.
The Environment
Still here? Excellent.
Our customers own the exact devices you’ll be designing for. They feel it when the capacitive camera control pass-through has latency, they see it when the camera cutout is a hair off-center, and they know what 0.2mm of extra lip does to a swipe from the edge of a screen. They also post about it, in public, within hours of a product landing. A sample review you rushed in April is a 500-comment Reddit thread in September.
You’d sit in Product Development, on a small team that takes every product from blank canvas to mass production. You’ll build and review CAD, test samples at every stage, write actionable feedback that’s clear enough to operate on, and help carry products through the partner certification programs that get us onto a retailer’s shelf. Now and then, you’ll present your work to other teams, so the people selling the product understand why it’s shaped the way it is.
The pace is set by OEM launch calendars. A device date moves, and your deadline moves with it. Some years, that’s more products in Q4 than most ID teams ship in a decade. The team that handles that is half a dozen, which means a junior designer at dbrand owns full products, not slices of them.
The Characteristics
- Agile: CAD review on one product, sample review on a second, a quality issue on a third, all in the same week. You switch between them without losing the thread on any.
- Analytical: Every decision touches look, feel, function, manufacturability, and cost. You know which one you’re trading off, and can articulate why.
- Collaborative: Your updates keep the team, other departments, and our production team aligned on where each project stands and what’s needed next. When a problem needs fresh eyes, you ask for them.
- Curious: When something in your design doesn’t work, you find out why. When something in someone else’s does, you find out why too.
- Enthusiastic: An unanswered development email, an odd test result, a sample that feels slightly wrong. You deal with it before anyone asks you to.
- Innovative: You start with research and sketches, explore widely, and iterate until the strongest idea survives. Sometimes that’s a new product. Sometimes it’s a simpler mechanism or a cleaner way around a manufacturing constraint. Both count.
- Perfectionist: Our customers notice 0.1 mm. You catch it before they do. Your QC checklist gets longer every launch because you keep finding new ways a product can go wrong.
- Persistent: T0 is never right. Neither is T2. You rework it, or rethink it, until the golden sample is actually production-ready.
- Reliable: Feedback goes out on time. Sample reviews are thorough. The project stays on schedule because you did.
The Responsibilities and Qualifications
You’ll be responsible for:
- Taking products from the first sketch through DFM to mass production, and staying with them until the golden sample is signed off.
- Building, developing, and reviewing production-ready CAD that can go straight to tooling without a follow-up question.
- Testing and reviewing samples at every stage, from T0 onward, and writing feedback that can be acted on the same day.
- Carrying products through partner certification programs: evaluating samples, running the testing, and getting the submissions in on time.
- Keeping quality and schedule on track through clear, regular communication with manufacturing, in writing.
- Market research on product categories we don’t play in yet, and the occasional presentation on how we design to the rest of the company.
The Qualifications
What you’ll need:
- A degree or diploma in Industrial Design, or the experience and portfolio that make one unnecessary.
- Production-ready CAD in Onshape that can go straight to tooling. Solidworks or Fusion 360 is fine if that’s where you learned, as long as you can make the switch.
- A working understanding of injection molding, and a real interest in every other mass production process you haven’t used yet.
- A mechanical instinct: you can look at a part and guess how it’ll fail before the test tells you.
- The ability to explain a design problem simply, in writing and out loud, to someone who doesn’t share your background.
- Enough interest in phones, consoles, and computers to have opinions about how they’re built.
- A valid passport, for travel when the project calls for it.
The Moment of Truth
The job starts between $50,000 and $60,000 per year with health, dental, vision, profit-sharing and GRSP benefits. The position is fully remote, with occasional visits to our HQ a few minutes west of Pearson Airport.
Still think you can catch a 0.1 mm problem before it reaches a mould?
To be perfectly honest, we doubt it.
You’re welcome to prove us wrong.
Vacancy Disclosure: This is a new role.
